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Comment by madrox | Hacker News Reader

This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it. Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement.

I'm one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for. There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues. I migrated to topic-based sites as a result.

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That’s not the point the article was making. Imagine if, by subscribing to /r/books, your posts on /r/funny were governed by the moderators of /r/books, even though they are unrelated subreddits. (I know this happens sometimes under the table when mods get angry but it’s not how Reddit is “supposed” to work).

It seems like mastodon is essentially forcing you to choose a subreddit that will be your governing community, then that becomes your identity. It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account. (I don’t have a mastodon account, this is my impression of what the article says).

We could, you know, use the ActivityPub stream primitives and organize them like subreddits. Either an instance would host the "subreddit" and identity gets cached or proxied, or the forum topics themselves are specified and agreed to by groups of instances (USENET style).

Lemmy does this: https://join-lemmy.org/

I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name

More awful than “toots”?

What's so awful about it?

>I'm naively convinced that Lemmy will never take off purely due to the awful name

I just assumed it was a tribute to Lemmy Caution[0]. And Lemmy Caution is one cool dude.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_Caution

Whoa; calling it awful is a bit Overkill! Overkill! Overkill!

Not really. Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit.

If you end up participating in subreddits that discuss political topics the mods of subreddit A will ban you for even participating in subreddit B. Or the mods or some other user on the subreddit will report you after trawling through your post history.

Now I am not fully against this. If you find a user in you subreddit who has a habit of posting opinions on some other subreddit that go on the lines of "Women should not be allowed to work and are only mean to make kids" they probably are functioning on a very different set of axioms and will probably make your space worse with their participation.

But things can get petty pretty quickly.

So you essentially end up maintaining different alts for different topics or subreddits.

> Reddit also has similar issues of being forced to choose a "governing" subreddit

I’ve been on Reddit for 10 years and I’ve only experienced this… once? Twice at the most. It happened so long ago I can’t even remember the specifics.

I’m not against it either, in theory, but I wouldn’t say it’s a defining feature of Reddit or even a common occurrence the way it is for Mastodon.

This sort of thing isn't particularly new though. It was the same for anyone that was around during the IRC days, your channel would be under a specific IRC server umbrella and you'd be expected to follow that servers rules.

It's that but expanded to where servers can also communicate with other servers, so the general expectation is that you follow the server rules and other servers can assume the rules tell you how that server will behave in aggregate.

It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.

IRC doesn't have accounts, identity, or federation. It was normal and expected that you would use multiple servers at the same time for different topics.

> It's a feature not a bug because it allows you to identify servers that might not fit with your group and weed out individuals that cause problems across multiple servers.

That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.

That's incorrect. Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv especially on the larger networks where dealing with certain individuals or impersonation required verification. And your second point is also incorrect as there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world.

> That's exactly the bug. Imagine if one IRC network blacklisted you just because you chatted on another IRC network.

This is exactly what IRC networks did. They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks. Mastodon just makes that explicit.

> Many IRC networks evolved to have some form of identity verification through nickserv

Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't.

> there were many umbrella servers that would be used for various communities to call home in a proto-Discord world.

Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive.

> They maintained a blacklist of hosts that were compromised in case of spyware, or if users were particularly prolific and abusive across networks.

That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.

> Some IRC networks do, but it's always an ad-hoc extension. IRC qua IRC doesn't.

Sure, hence why I used the word 'Evolved'. Not all IRC networks did , but it became common place. I'm not sure what your point is here unless you're arguing Mastodon should just toss away the evolution of discussion.

> Did those have channels that passed blacklists around and would ban you on other channels' say-so, or because you were in channels they didn't like? I'm sure there were some channels that did, but it certainly wasn't seen as a positive

Yes? That was the job of the server admin? It's like you weren't around when IRC servers were starting pissing contests between the two. The freenode drama wasn't even very long ago but this kind of stuff goes way back.

> That's not the same thing at all. I'm talking about getting banned on one server just because you joined another server.

See above. I've been in plenty of IRC drama where prominent users were told to go back to servers or kicked off.

> Sure, hence why I used the word 'Evolved'. Not all IRC networks did , but it became common place. I'm not sure what your point is here unless you're arguing Mastodon should just toss away the evolution of discussion.

My point is that Mastodon has a global first-class concept of identity, which is quite a big difference from IRC.

> Yes? That was the job of the server admin? It's like you weren't around when IRC servers were starting pissing contests between the two. The freenode drama wasn't even very long ago but this kind of stuff goes way back.

> See above. I've been in plenty of IRC drama where prominent users were told to go back to servers or kicked off.

I saw plenty of spats and petty drama on IRC, sure. At the channel level it usually ended up with someone making a new channel, since you don't need any skill or privileges to do that. At the network level, maybe a network splits (as freenode did), maybe some individuals get banned, but I absolutely never heard of users who were otherwise well-behaved on network X getting banned just because they happened to also chat on network Y (and given the lack of global accounts, how would you even tell?)

If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance).

But I agree with the model Mastodon is building out over the model of centralization that Twitter had. I think Twitter encouraged too much topic-free shouting into the void, which decreased the utility of discourse in general.

It's also really unclear to me where the OP is getting the sense that Mastodon instances are so heavily topic-oriented. I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic; the flavor of sites seems to be more about shared interests in the sense of old IRC communities than in the sense of topicality like a subreddit.

Good points, and honestly I’m more curious to try out Mastodon after this discussion than I was before.

> I haven't observed any stories of Mastodon admins blocking users for being off-topic

I myself was banned from a small instance over a misunderstanding without prior notice (since english isn't my native language). This was my only account on mastodon, so I lost all my contacts.

The admin had contact info on the instance, but I didn't have the motivation to be in mastodon anymore.

EDIT: I'd like to add. I don't really see mastodon as a social network.. if we're comparing it to something, it's more like a simple messaging group.

> If this is a major concern for a mastodon user, they will need to either host their own instance or find an instance with as lax moderation policies as possible (and deal with the risk that other interests could interpret that as toxic and ban the whole instance).

If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors. The suggestion to then "host your own instance" looks a lot like "build your own X" that we had prior to Musk's take over of Twitter from people who didn't really care about the problem (or even see it as a problem). Do you really think people will start hosting their own instances for this?

> the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors

I don't know precisely where people ever got the idea that the kernel of the nature of the Internet was ever anything other than "Admins rule the system."

It has always been the nature of the machine that you either operate as a guest of someone else's system or you own a system (and maintain the social etiquette / business agreements necessary to stay peered to other systems, as well as fight the perpetual fight against those who would use your tool to do harm).

From e-mail to USENET to IRC to web sites to social media platforms, the social aspect of the network itself is and always has been inextricable from its function. it's a network built by, for, and of people. Mostly volunteers. Mostly volunteers who do it for the love of the geekery of making sand think and lightning dance in a bottle, of building a thing that lets people in Akron talk to people in Anchorage, stepping back, and going "Wow, it's neat that that's possible."

I agree with you that it's a tall ask to tell people "If you really want to participate as a peer, you need to technically be a peer," but I have never seen another alternative floated that had any chance of success whatsoever. You cannot force people to talk to each other. You cannot force system operators to allow traffic through private systems that they don't choose to allow through. If you try, they'll leave, and you'll get a network governed by government instead of volunteers (which we can see plenty of examples of already, and they're more restrictive than what we have now).

The 'Net also interprets lack of censorship as damage and routes around it. Always has.

"If by being open and liberal (in the non-political sense) one risks being banned then essentially it's punishment (or the threat of punishment) for defection and the outcome is for everyone to end up being governed by the censors."

Except there's a whole lot of the Fediverse that doesn't work by this "free speech is fascism that must be banned" principle. You can even find huge lists of such nodes in the huge blacklists maintained by this loose community.... And it's quite refreshing to communicate without worrying about every word you say.

It's an outside of the Fediverse problem which therefore cannot escape it, but with solutions that work both outside and inside it.

> It’s not like Reddit where you can switch between different subreddits at will without affecting your account.

Maybe not by technical design, but subreddit moderators ban people for merely being subscribed to other subs all the time. I once got banned from participating in r/antiwork because I was subscribed to r/wallstreetsilver. That's not the only time, but that's probably the most stupid example. No, I didn't break any rules.

Yeah, but that didn't prevent you from posting on r/wallstreetsilver, nor was your account tied to r/wallstreetsilver in any way.

Of course it is. For example:

If you comment in r/conservative, even as someone who isn't subscribed and just happened to end up on the post due to r/all or a crosspost, odds are you'll get hit with a number of bans on other subreddits.

This is for the same reason that mastodon's federation works the way it does: those other groups do not want to associate with or interact with accounts that talk on or interact with these certain communities.

If you interact with a toxic subreddit that has a habit for harassing other communities, those other subreddits likely will ban you just to save themself the trouble of dealing with someone who might bring them more stress or hassle.

Likewise if you federate with a toxic instance or are hosted by a toxic instance, other instances will block yours and you'll be cut off.

The only extension to this is that your instance can do the same to others. But that's really not that massive of a concern as you can pretty easily just move to a new instance or better yet, host your own instance and not have to worry with it at all.

What you're talking about seems quite different from what the blog post is talking about.

You're talking about signing up on a toxic instance, and thus getting banned from other instances.

The blog post is talking about signing up on an instance with strict rules, and those rules applying to posts you make no matter what instance the post is on, which makes it impossible to express yourself the way you want anywhere. Note that this doesn't involve toxic instances at all.

I don't really see the issue?

The instance provides the resources you consume to access Mastodon. In exchange you follow their rules.

If you don't like their rules you can move to someone else's instance or even host your own. The process seems pretty simple: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...

I don't object in principle to instance admins having a lot of power, precisely because they provide the resources and you can move to some other instance whenever you want. That seems reasonable.

There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances, including one where you're a responsible member of society and another where you're tooting spicy politics under a pseudonym all day (and the network opts in or out of you as it prefers).

>I don't really see the issue?

The issue is that the instance you join dictates what "being a responsible member of the society" is, and if you don't fit into the restrictions of that one particular instance, you can lose your account which you use to interact with the entire federation.

Given that Mastodon admins can read direct messages of their users and ban them based on that, this is bound to have an effect on how users on Mastodon interact.

>There's also nothing preventing you from having multiple Mastodon accounts on multiple instances

Except for the fact that people use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to represent themselves. Which means one account. Having pseudonyms defeats the purpose.

In Mastodon, the model, in essence, makes you represent the instance you joined when you speak, with its values and restrictions — not yourself.

When deviance means loss of access, that's bound to result in increase in polarization and echo-chamberism.

Correspondingly, people who run instances block entire other instances based on how they perceive them.

This takes all the problems we have with email, and makes them worse.

"You can run your own instance" is an argument that works as well as "don't like Gmail? Host your own email server!".

I wouldn't have an issue if being banned from the instance you joined still allowed you to migrate to another instance after the ban without losing any data / identity / etc.

That's to say, if your identity wasn't tied to any particular instance.

Which is the point of the article.

your identity also isn't tied to your account, just make two of them. what a weird thing to get hung up on.

>your identity also isn't tied to your account

Right, because reputation isn't a thing, having people know that this account represents you isn't a thing, and so on.

There's a reason Elon Musk messing with verified accounts on Twitter was a bit of an issue.

In short, if you want people to know that an account represents you, then your account is tied to your identity, and your identity, conversely, is tied to your account.

As I said earlier, the problem with Mastodon is that your Mastodon account doesn't represent you. It represents the instance you signed up with. What you say must be filtered through that lens, and will be perceived through those lens by people who make blacklists, creating a positive feedback loop.

It's tribalism by design.

The most common solution to this on Reddit is to have multiple accounts. Most people have multiple accounts of their own volition because they don’t want their post and comment history in some communities to be browsable via posts and comments in other communities. I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t. However I could see a future where it’s the norm even for a non-anonymous account to have multiple non-anonymous personas on the fediverse.

>The most common solution to this on Reddit is to have multiple accounts.

This isn't a solution to "this" because this problem doesn't exist on reddit.

You don't get banned from reddit because any single subreddit didn't like what you wrote. Subreddit mods can't ban you from other communities. Admin of the instance you sign up with on Mastodon can.

Mastodon puts the banhammer of the network admins into hands of many, many people who run instances, aren't bound by any rules, and can read your direct messages.

>I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing becomes the norm on Mastodon as well. I realize that the analogy isn’t perfect because most Reddit accounts are anonymous, whereas a much larger number of Twitter/Mastodon accounts aren’t.

Well that was one issue highlighted in the article linked.

Go figure, there's a place for having an online social network where people can authentically express themselves.

In Mastodon, you can only express yourself to the extent that it complies with the views of the admin of the instance you are with.

The only real workaround is to create separate accounts for each venue that aren't obviously connected. That way, you won't get banned in one place for stuff you do in another.

That's not the example that either I or the article are considering.

We are talking about getting banned from the instance you are federating with.

You can't get booted off of reddit for violating rules specific to a subreddit.

But with Mastodon, the initial choice of instance to join determines all future Mastodon behavior.

Yes, but that's not as bad as what satellites is saying. satellites is saying your behavior will be restricted in ALL subreddits (even subreddits that don't want to restrict you) because of the subreddit you signed up with. Your situation is just about being restricted in subreddits that want to restrict you.

Is it really that common? It’s happened to me once, in my 10 years of using Reddit. Not saying my anecdote proves anything but I wonder how rampant it really is.

>I’m one of those people that preferred Twitter before it became overrun with politics. Not that I'm not political, but it's not what I wanted to go to Twitter for.

You know that you can follow who you want on Twitter, right? You made it political for yourself by following people that talk politics

this ignores the algorithm pushing stuff to you and it entirely ignores comments from randoms.

Does it though? Aside from trending sidebar, I’ve never had the algorithm show me a tweet that wasn’t tweeted or retweeted or liked by someone I’m following.

Most people are in the "home view" which is algorithm based. I've heard reports of twitter switching people back to the "home view" randomly without them doing anything. This has never happened to me, it's never switched to "home" without me doing it explicitly, so who knows what actually happens. I'm always in the timeline view, which only shows tweets and retweets from people I follow.

The Android app at least used to be fairly aggressive about flipping you back to "Home," but at some point it seems to have stopped doing that.

1) this definitely happens if your timeline is on the algorithmic version and not the chronological one.

2) the problem is precisely that I do not want to know what my very topic oriented follow is doing in terms of political tweeting. I’m sure this is a hard problem to solve, and I don’t want someone to be non-political for the sake of their follows. In most instances, I 100% agree with their views without reservation even. I just don’t want to see it on twitter. I would like to see any non political, topic oriented content they like and retweet however.

Linked accounts: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7292

Right now you can emulate this by putting your other instance links in your bio. I do think there should be a dedicated "linked instances" section which is more coordinated (only lets you link when you can access both accounts, and updates every other instance when you add a new one).

I hope they add this feature soon enough. The nice thing is that anyone can add this feature, and if the devs approve it, most active instances will likely update. I won't be the one to though :)

It does feel like the author has somewhat missed the fact that Twitter has become a space in which, while you can technically say whatever you want, is driven overwhelmingly by opinions on topic-du-jour social issues.

Further, the communities on Twitter that aren't part of this are largely segregated from the hive by virtue of consisting of users that are explicitly trying to avoid it. And there's a perpetual risk that the forerunners of those communites are eventually sucked in by the Borg Cube of banal political debate regardless - we've all seen this happen in our feeds, and there's a good chance you've unfollowed or muted at least one person for abruptly and loudly picking up on some political or social topic.

This is pretty much exactly what Mastodon is trying to avoid. Having over-subscribed political debate forums hang a sign over their door is definitely fine by me.

Twitter wasn't built as a community platform. It's always had the user-centric model, which works well for the types of people who helped it gain popularity to begin with, namely journalists, celebrities, politicians, brands, gov agencies etc.

No wonder I never really got the point of Twitter. This makes a lot more sense, or why there is a concern for making sure identity -- or brand -- is cohesive. I prefer visiting among different communities and affinity groups.

In a lot of cases, twitter’s model is better. In topic oriented websites (reddit is a good example), it becomes a shithole if you happen to share any interest that hits closer to 100k people. So a math or programming oriented topic is effectively able to moderate by pushing the memes and shitposts to mathmemes or programminghumor, but science gets overrun with shitty bots because of how wide the topic is.

In many other cases, reddit’s model works better too. It just isn’t definitively one or the other.

> sucked in by the Borg Cube of banal political debate

That's an apt description of the phenomenon.

I think the argument he makes at the end is that "we should have a centralized account model" and then let exactly what you say shine. It'll be like a twitter reddit.

Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account.

Reddit is about the subreddit's popularity

Twitter is about personal popularity

> Problem: If you sign up for say LEGO reddit, but want to post a geo-political thing, then suddenly YOU CANNOT because you need a new account.

Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.

that's a problem, yes. BUT.

Reddit is popularity of the subreddit centric. So your own personal popularity doesn't really matter. Its why people make throw-away accounts all the darn time.

Twitter is about personal popularity. This is why it is so important on twitter to have personal recognition.

Mastodon is reddit style moderation, with twitter style identity/popularity.

This only happens on hyper political subreddits you don't want to be in anyway.

Last I checked, the ban bots exist in default subreddits (like /r/TwoXChromosomes) and there are reason you might want to comment in one of the shunned subs - not that you will usually know a sub is on that list until the bots get you. This kind of guilt by association is horrible.

Being a default in no way makes something not a "hyper political subreddit you don't want to be in anyway". TwoXChromosomes meets that description.

It happens on /worldnews which is a huge sub and shouldn't (in theory) be hyperpolitical. I've even seen it on subs like /nhl that have have nothing to do with politics at all, banning people for posts on other subs that don't align with the mods politics. Not that it matters, Reddit is essentially useless now but at one point it was a great source of information.

r/comics went on one the other day from what I saw.

Basically a mod (anonymous because modmail) telling someone "Republicans are all the racists, say this or continue to be banned." ... in the fucking comics sub.

But to me, mods going off the deep end is just the latest cherry on top.

They killed themselves to me back in 2016/2017(?) when they changed their algorithms to try and stop r/the_donald, it all feels stale now, like it is only updated at most once a day.

I have spent an unhealthy amount of time on reddit over the past 14 years and have never heard of such a thing. I find it unlikely that it's a significant problem which I've just been lucky to never brush against.

It exists, but it only really happens on either subs with zealot moderators who are trying to maintain ideological purity, or on normal subs who are just trying to get rid of particularly obnoxious users who are more often than not part of the first category.

Ask your favorite search engine about

    Reddit ban "biological terrorism"

for an example of such mass bans for posting in the wrong places from earlier this year.

You're lucky. Naturally this isn't something that the moderators in question particularly like to talk about as it instantly gives them away as nutjobs. The thing with malicious moderation is that if it is done well, lurkers never realize. That in turn contributes to a warped view of reality. That said, reddit is still better than other social networks because, with some very big caveats, moderation is somewhat isolated from one subreddit to the next.

I’ve only seen discussion of it on political subs, which I take to mean it mostly occurs on political subs.

+1. While I trust this phenomenon happens, it's something I've never seen, and is certainly not a defining part of the experience.

Source: Absurd amount of time on Reddit.

I just can’t believe you’ve never heard of this. It’s extremely common and is prevalent in some of the largest subreddit. Or was when I left Reddit for good last year

> moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with

I made a user-centric version of this and it's the only thing that has made Reddit usable. All the people who participate in toxic communities are just gone, invisible. I don't have to see them, their replies don't show up in my inbox. It's absolute bliss. I'm sure there are plenty of false positives but I really don't care since the value of any particular user's comments is zero.

Like people seem to intuitively get that /r/all is only usable once you filter out basically everything; my own list has a little over 1200 subreddits on it and then you add in keywords.

It was the same with Twitter. The enjoyment and usability skyrocketed once you used a recursive blocker on worst kinds of people.

I can understand the frustration but it's really hard to argue with the results.

Is this an extension or user script? Care to share?

>Reddit doesn't actually solve that problem because subreddit moderators often run ban scripts that check which subreddits you have interacted with. If you happen to talk to the wrong people, you wind up banned and need a new account to talk to other people.

Broken analogy. You can get banned from any subreddit for any reason, but you won't need a new account, because you can still be on all the other subreddits and communicate with other users.

Also, with over 140K combined karma (90K comment, 45K post karma, roughly), I have never experienced that issue on that 6-year-old account.

True, but personal popularity is for me at least based on a useful property of people. When I was trying to explain why I enjoy Twitter so much, I would say, it is like Reddit but you only see people on your allow list, or vetted by your allow list. Reddit has too much junk and people I do not enjoy reading, but with twitter even if someone I follow doesn’t know that much about something, I think they are intelligent, funny, and reasonable, and that outweighs the dilution of expertise. Sure, if I want to buy some audiophile equipment, then I might follow reddit links in the search, but for conversation, I like people of a certain wit and style.

I don't want the streams to cross. I don't want to get my politics into my LEGO. But I also don't want to track multiple accounts.

exactly!!!!

i want to be able to go to a geopolitical mastodon and enjoy posting/reading there, and ignore the rest of the federation, but sometimes I want to see all like reddit's /r/all or the front page.

Yeah I'd rather a client that can transparently create new accounts for each community. You can't interact honestly or freely on places like reddit because nut cases will read every one of your comments to piece together enough info to dox you. You have to be hyper vigilant and post enough fake or in accurate info to throw them off but it's just not as good as a private community you can trust.

That's just because Reddit lets people see where someone posts. On Matrix and Discord, you can use the same identity to join two different rooms, and only people that are in the same two rooms will know that you're there. It's always cute serendipity when I join a different Matrix room or Discord guild and find someone I know from one of the others. Quite charming. Reddit's public-timeline-by-default is what encourages the crazy stalking and cross-sub banning behavior, but its norms come from a time when Reddit and the web was a lot smaller.

This is arguably a client issue and not a federation issue. In the days of instant messaging we had no problem managing our AIM, ICQ, MSN, etc all in Trillian. We manage lots of accounts all the time anyway.

The alternative is we revive OpenID, but good luck with that

Popularity of clients like a trillan do not even reach 1% of what social media is today. It worked back then mostly because the internet was more often composed of techies with sufficient tech knowledge.

I don't think that's a fediverse problem. Nothing is stopping a server from implementing OpenID or some other centralized identity solution. However, these things don't happen for a reason.

>This is not a bug. It's a feature. You see this today in subreddits, twitch channels, and discord servers, and the community is better for it

The problem is for people who are looking for a Twitter replacement, Mastodon isn't it.

Mastodon servers are very different from subreddits. I could participate in 100s of subreddits and follow each of their rules just fine. I'm not going to make even 10s of accounts on various Mastodon servers and create bespoke networks for each.

If Mastodon wants to have communities, it should have a first class concept of communities where people can participate in as many of them as interests that they have. Servers aren't that.

anytime de/centralization comes up I'm reminded about Taleb's take on the decentralzation of Switzerland's. It has messy federalized politics compared to the rest of the world that is obsessed with centralized governance. And Mastodon is like Switzerland quite literally how Taleb describes it in Antifragile ... Boring and full of small town drama (when it comes to moderation).

It also seems not appealing to the many accounts who are only about influence or optimizing their follower count. Mastodon is like a reset button which is either a nightmare or a boon depending on what your original strategy was on twitter.

Reddit and Discord are absolutely awful on this. Hundreds of the most valuable subreddits have been destroyed by corrupt mods, lifetime appointments, and absolute power over the subreddit. We should find better solutions and in no way seek to replicate their flaws.

This problem was 'fixed' before Reddit even became a massive platform. Discoverability means people can easily leave draconian instances/sites in the dust, as is the case with almost all of the community splits back in the 2000s. Unfortunately, anti-discoverability is the norm now.

>This is not a bug. It's a feature. [...] I'm one of those people that

...that didn't read the article fully, because it addresses this point exactly.

Small communities aren't a problem. Having your account linked with just one of them is.

Imagine what reddit was like if you had to pick a subreddit and stick with it for the entire history of the account. You'd only be allowed to post on other subreddits if you are following the rules of That One Subreddit.

This is what Mastodon federation is like.

forgive me if i’m wrong, but this comes across as if you’ve never used mastodon.

i’ve been on there for a few years and i can’t for the life of me see how any of this is even a concern for using it.

if you’re upset that some servers are more lenient than others, or that some servers have more active moderation, then just move servers. i’ve done it twice and it took like five minutes—you don’t lose followers or anything, they come right along with you as move…

Twitter has communities just like the other platforms, however, it's follow/follower model is a fatal flaw that encourages toxicity.

Every single community that flourishes on Twitter eventually devolves into a set of people who spend all their energy complaining about something. You can choose to ignore the complaints, but after a while it just becomes too much. Once you've followed enough people to be part of a Twitter community, it's annoyingly difficult to undo that.

People will be people and the same toxic crap happens on Reddit and Discord. These other platforms just provide an easy way to leave an entire community if you unhappy with the moderation policies and/or general group dynamics.

I have a friend that insists that "Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs", but I do not agree with it. I am writing my own blog post about Mastodon: https://bristle-tachometer-5db.notion.site/Yet-another-Masto...

I personally enjoy being part of a community, getting to know the people around it, and get to chat about it in small discussion groups. I hope the Fediverse continues to evolve, and helps to build communities. Twitter has become too much about building an audience.

> Mastodon is Twitter with HOAs

I think it's a very apt analogy that's broadly correct. The crucial difference is that Mastodon servers are not a scarce resource (unlike land & buildings), so you can shop around until you find an HOA that you like, or just start your own.

There was no control over it since people tweeted about whatever was on their mind, which was sometimes interesting tech things, and the rest of the time was social issues.

You must have joined Twitter quite late then. In the early days people complained that Twitter was silly because people tweeted things like what they were having for breakfast. Those complaints were a form of social control - peer pressure really - that drove people to use Twitter for Serious Things instead.

>Places with community moderation have higher levels of engagement.

quoting DIRECTLY from the post

> the ideal solution would be to [...] have some way to create "forum-like" instances where no accounts can be created but where specific and highly moderated discussions can take place.

How does conversations work between people on different instances when it comes to moderation? Is an entire conversation taking place on the instance the top post is on?

The conversation happens across the instances. User reports first go to the instance of the reporter, but can also be anonymously forwarded on to the instance of the reported post as well.

If a user is bothering someone on your instance, then either your instance or that users instance could take action.

If your instance bans them, they won't be banned anywhere else. If their instance bans them, they will be fully suspended.

Now imagine how inconvenient it would be if you needed to create a new account for each subreddit or discord server. That's how Mastodon works because accounts are tied to communities.

Hardly ?

It's way more inconvenient to create a new account for each forum (including this one), which is hardly inconvenient.

And it's even easier on Mastodon because you don't enven need one account per server !

Reddit has r/All though.

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